Agentic commerce is commerce in which AI agents discover, evaluate, recommend, purchase and manage products and services on behalf of people or organisations. Business-to-Agent (B2A) is the business-side response to it: making yourself discoverable, understandable and transactable by those agents.
How agentic commerce works
An agent turns a goal (“reorder my usual coffee”, “book the cheapest direct flight Tuesday”) into actions: it searches, reads structured data, compares options, and completes a transaction through an agent-accessible checkout. The human sets intent and constraints; the agent does the work.
The rails that make it possible
- Agent-to-tool access: Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for connecting agents to data and tools, released November 2024. Fact
- Agent-to-agent coordination: Google's Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol for interoperability between agents. Fact
- Agent checkout: the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), co-developed by Stripe and OpenAI, which powers Instant Checkout in ChatGPT (announced 29 September 2025). Fact
- Agent payments: Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), plus Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay, which use tokenisation to authorise agent-initiated payments. Fact
Who is buying and selling this way?
On the buy side: assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity are adding shopping abilities. On the sell side: platforms are exposing agent-facing catalogues and checkout, with ACP bringing Etsy and over a million Shopify merchants into ChatGPT checkout. Pattern See the B2A examples and landscape.
How B2A relates to agentic commerce
Agentic commerce is the market behaviour; B2A is what a business does about it. If agentic commerce is “agents shopping,” B2A is “being a business agents can shop from.”
Get ready to sell to agents
Make your products purchasable by AI agents.